Dreams on "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" · 1:29pm Apr 7th, 2016
Okay, here's a better dream for you. It's one day late and more about the graphic novel series I've been reading as a follow-up than Batman V Superman itself, but I'm pretty proud of it.
The actual dream was split up a couple times by me waking up briefly, and it didn't really have any story, but it still fascinates me as I lie here awake three hours before I need to be up. It's all coalesced into a dramatic intro, even.
A crowd in worn finery spills out of a stage theater in downtown Gotham, and clashes into the heavy foot traffic. A lone, nondescript man in a bowtie is accosted and tased by two policemen in full body armor who drag him off without a word. The crowd doesn't even stop walking.
Below the lower rooftops of the South Side, a single man drops to an unseen sniper's bullet, and the street brawl surrounding him freezes, before the dozens of ragged men and women disperse with quiet haste.
Outside a warehouse on the docks, a burst of automatic fire breaks the near-silence, followed by much more. A company of drug runners has a misunderstanding with the remnants of what was once Carmine Falcone's criminal empire.
At the front door of Wayne Manor, after months of debate, an arrest warrant finally arrives for Alfred Pennyworth, delivered by a full squad of riot police. Jim Gordon lies in a cell already, unable to find sleep.
The moon through the haze shines brown, and though it was disabled by vandals weeks ago, people all over the city look up at the night sky and swear they can still see the bat signal on the smog.
The Dark Knight is dead, found feet from the waiting doors of the batmobile, bleeding out onto the alley pavement. Bruce Wayne's estate has been seized in the investigation, including Wayne Tech themselves.
Batman has finally fallen victim to his war. The city, already under martial law in the days leading up to his death, is still under it months later.
The war continues in his absence as Gotham Police Department is forced to take up Batman's mantle of protection for the city, and Gotham's finest are already slipping under the pressure. Gotham's remaining defenders are forced into hiding as their identities are quickly exposed, and villains old and new prepare for war, in a police-controlled, lawless city.
This is an MMORPG, by the way, with all of the complexities and convoluted-ness of the comics that I mentioned before. There are no quest-giving NPC's, and no dungeons to crawl. Player interaction and communication is constrained to the point where you can never be sure who is a player and who is an NPC, because as a player, you can become anyone in the city-- even the next Batman.
Interactions and events are all taken into account by the game, and automatically define how characters speak to and of each other. If you're a crooked cop speaking to a rookie determined to root out police corruption, your set dialogue options with him will make it seem as if it's a scripted story, but in reality they're generated by the game as a result of what your character knows and might want as a result of what he's done.
And on a larger scale, if all players walking around on the street decide to go criminal just because it's a game and they can, the game will generate fewer criminal NPC's so the "good guy" side isn't completely overwhelmed.
The dreams I had of this game were just of cells filled with players and tons of activity. More than anything, the game just gave me a sense of being complex and chaotic, and that everyone around me was a hero in their own big story.
I bet a game like this would be hard to program, but I would love to play it. I imagine it wouldn't be too much of a step from something like E.V.E. Online. Oh, and this game wouldn't let you start a new character until something happened to end your current character's time in Gotham.
I also don't know what it would be called. Gotham Online, I guess, though that's just boring. For some reason the imagery of the moon shining brown really struck me along with the fragments of dream I remembered that became that intro, so I'm feeling partial to something like Batman: Gotham Brown. It might not seem like the best idea later today when I'm more awake, though.
That's actually an awesome-sounding idea. Sometimes tour dreams are awesome, apparently.
3854259 They kinda are. I need to make this a regular series. I also need to get back to the grammar stuff, but that'll have to wait until all the grammar homework is done. I hope I still have access to the online textbook after the semester ends...
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I am looking forward to more of the grammar stuff, as well. That stuff is eye-opening.